Tasting History is a worthwhile YouTube channel on historical cooking. He presents historical recipes with some background and then tries them out.
Here's one for mead and one for a medieval outlaw's table.
His current medieval cooking playlist has 52 videos, and he has a lot of others as well.
So the medieval mead recipe is interesting, because it's making mead like beer instead of like wine. You can do it either way. Boiling it and skimming it is like beer because beer creates less alcohol, and therefore it's important to sterilize everything beforehand. The scum you're skimming off, though, isn't "scum" exactly; it's wax from the honey. If you go this route, boiling and skimming it means that the final mead does clarify more quickly than if you go the wine route and just mix everything and let it ferment.
ReplyDeleteWe eat lots of venison here, but chiefly I make chili with it. However, at the holidays I make steak pies out of venison, and these are almost exactly the medieval recipe. You'll find several such recipes in the archives.
What struck me about the mead recipe is that it perfectly suits a band of raiders who expect to be away from home all summer on a Viking tour. They wouldn't want to pack a summer's worth of mead, which would take up too much room in the ships that could be used for things like loot.
ReplyDeleteSo, when the mead they brought from home runs out and they get to a point where they can take a few days off and where they can take the local honey (say, a monastery w/ bee hives), they can quickly make enough mead to refill the few barrels they brought, then move on to the next raid.